From: "Booker C.Bense" <bbense+comp.lang.ruby.Oct.13.06@...>
Date: 2006-10-13T23:40:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Silent out-of-index problems--how much of a problem are they really?

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In article <452F174F.8070304@sbcglobal.net>,
Kenneth McDonald  <kenneth.m.mcdonald@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>So my question is, _in practice_, how difficult is it to track down 
>index-out-of-bounds-errors in Ruby? It can certainly be a godawful 
>problem in C, and I'm pretty sure it would be in Python, too, if 
>exceptions weren't thrown. And in Ruby, how does one track done where 
>such errors actually occur? In Python, I can simply look at the stack trace.
>

If you use the Ruby error handling methodology, it's generally
pretty simple since nil has few methods. Most times if you're
accessing an Array element you're going to do something with it, 
so the error crops up fairly immediately. Unfortunately, it does 
require this complicated setup %-). 

begin 
   <code>
rescue => error
     print error.inspect
end

that and some introspective code in method_missing will go a long
ways toward catching most runtime errors. I'm pretty sure you can
get a full stack trace if you need it, but I've never needed it. 

_ Booker C. Bense 

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